THE WWPH INTERVIEWS…
WWPH INTERVIEWS: Dr. Tonee Mae Moll on her new edition of You Cannot Save Here
Dr. Tonee Mae Moll is a queer and trans writer and educator. Her debut memoir, Out of Step, won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award and was featured that year on the American Library Association’s annual list of notable LGBTQ+ books. Tonee Mae’s poetry has also received the Adele V. Holden award for creative excellence and the Bill Knott Poetry Prize. She is, most notably, a Gemini. More about Tonee Mae here.
You Cannot Save Here won the Jean Feldman Poetry Award from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House.
Available everywhere books are sold. However, support your WWPH and purchase your copy here.
Can you tell me about the significance of You Cannot Save Here in your writing career and the importance of its newly reissued edition?
It’s exciting because it’s my first full collection of poems. So, my first full book was a memoir, but You Cannot Save Here was the book that helped establish, hey, I’m a poet, and I have a book of poems, and it won an award, and I know what I’m doing. It’s a creative portion of my PhD dissertation, so it’ll always have a special place there too. And then the re-release is huge. It’s hard to be a writer, and people would say, oh, I want to read your work, and then be like, oh, well, here are two books with someone else’s name on it that you should go read, but I promise that was, or at least used to be, me. So having my books with my name on it is huge for that reason. I can point to them and not feel weird about pointing to a dead name or pointing to a photo on the back cover that doesn’t look anything like me anymore.
What is a word or words that you think best encapsulates the feeling of your poems throughout You Cannot Save Here?
It is apocalyptic, so that’d be the first word. I’ve had friends who described it as hope punk, and I love that reading of it. But a friend and collaborator of mine, Tracy Dimond, called the work posy-goth, which we discussd is like, sort of epicurean. The world is ending, and the world is bad, and there’s no lying about that. But it’s also like, here’s what we can do despite that. That’s build together, that’s enjoy life, that’s pursue happiness and pleasure.
Several years after completing the book, how do you reflect on your poetry and who you were as a writer during that time?
You know, it’s interesting because it’s as much me and having transitioned as it is the world and how it’s changed, right? So, the book started with an obsession about climate disaster, but from starting writing to it being published, we also elected the 45th president. We also have the global pandemic. All these other disasters happened and have continued to happen. And so, in the years since I started writing, in the years since You Cannot Save Here first dropped, the world has changed. And then, of course, I’ve changed too. And so, what you’ll see in the book are some poems that reflect on gender dysphoria from someone who is really yet to fully figure it out. And lately, it’s from someone who knows she’s a woman and also is undergoing the painful, contentious process of medical transition. Then on top of that, I’ve experienced a divorce since then, and so I’m also just writing sad girl falling in and out of love poems, and a lot has changed, both with me and the world around me.
Has your inspiration and writing changed since you transitioned?
I think so. I think I’m more comfortable occupying this particular voice and particular inspirations. I think prior to transition, I had, and I probably should not have had, but I did have an anxiety about saying all my like inspirations are these 20th century feminist poets and feminist theorist folks, and I just like, I shouldn’t have done that, right? Like people who think their boys are allowed to cherish feminist writers and feminist thinkers, too. But I’m much less self-conscious about that now and acknowledging my influences and writing poems that reflect that too.
Why do you think people should read these poems and buy this collection right now?
Well, number one, I would like for people to just have my book. More specifically, I would like them to have my name on their shelf. The new edition is for that reason, but the poems themselves continue to be relevant. The poems continue to be relevant. We continue to live in them more than ever. I’m feeling the same energy I felt when I wrote this book, which is like, wow, these are disastrous times. These are devastating times. How am I supposed to go to work? How am I supposed to go on dates? How am I supposed to deal with the oncoming of spring, when my news feed looks the way it does? You know, when we’re worried about the lives of ourselves, our neighbors, and our comrades overseas, how am I supposed to just get on with life when things look the way they do? That is how I felt when I started the book. Thinking about climate disaster, how I felt about the election of the 45th president, how I felt about COVID when it hit us, how we just keep going? How do we find joy when the world looks the way it does, that in 2025 continues to feel relevant, maybe even more than it did then.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers hoping to publish their work but are struggling to find themselves creatively?
Oh, what a lovely question, trying to find themselves creatively. I think the biggest thing I really believe is to write the work you want to write. Don’t think you have to write for a particular audience. Don’t think you have to write a particular voice. I was told early on if you’re chasing the trend, you are too late, right? If you don’t have something for the trend when it’s trending, you can’t chase it. So don’t try to write for what you think writing looks like now. And don’t try to write for some imagined audience that is sort of unpleaseable. Just write what you want to write. Write the weirdest stuff you want to write for the weirdos you want to read it, and your audience will find you, particularly in poetry, which can be so siloed anyway. Just pursue your weirdness and don’t worry about the marketing aspect of it.
Is there any question I didn’t ask you that you feel like I should have asked, or anything you just want to add?
I think the thing that I’d want to really emphasize is that I do think the book’s hopeful. When I was drafting this, one of my mentors was like, maybe this is great, but it’s pretty heavy, it’s pretty dark. And I went back to look at it, and it can be read that way. But the thing I told them, and I started rearranging the book in ways that tried to bring this out, is that it’s not just despair. The thing about writing an apocalypse is that there’s something that comes after. We would not write about the apocalypse if we didn’t believe there was someone on the other side of it reading the work. And so to think about apocalypse is to think about what comes after, and that makes it hopeful. There is hope in the work, and there’s hope in pursuing pleasure and poetry during just devastating times.
–Interview with Kate d’Arcy, WWPH Fellow, 2025
WWPH INTERVIEWS: VARUN GAURI, FOR THE BLESSINGS OF JUPITER AND VENUS
Varun Gauri was born in India and raised in the American Midwest. After studying philosophy in college and public policy in graduate school, he worked for more than two decades on global poverty and human rights, publishing academic articles and books on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. His short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was a Summer Writer-in-Residence at Washington, DC’s The Inner Loop. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is his first novel. More about Varun Gauri at his website here.
What inspired you to start writing creatively, and specifically, to write For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus?
My parents tried to sell me on a Hindu arranged marriage like their own. I resisted outwardly (my first wife was Jewish) but somehow relented in spirit, essentially sleepwalking, not really believing that marriage was mine to choose, shape, and make. So the seed of the book was an effort to understand what had compelled me about my parents’ arranged marriage, and how and why I fought it. Eventually, I grew fascinated by broader questions about the interplay of compatibility, passion, and acceptance in relationships.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about Avi and Meena, your main characters, as you were developing them?
Originally, I conceived Meena and Avi as opposites. Meena was supposed to be romantic, witty, worldly, and skeptical of arranged marriage while Avi was practical, simple-minded, provincial, and traditional. It took me a while to realize I was writing a novel, not a fable. What helped was recalling a commandment from Bret Anthony Johnston, one of my writing teachers: “You will not do black and white. You will not have one character who is greedy and another who is generous, one character who is strong and another who is weak. Each of your characters will be greedy and generous, strong and weak. Complexity makes them interesting.”
What surprised me was that Meena and Avi, despite their differences, share something important. Both struggle against the dead hand of the past. Meena chooses arranged marriage because her late father, whom she loved, counseled her to. Avi is traditional because his parents are in thrall to an ideologue. Identifying and living their authentic desires and values is a shared journey for Avi and Meena, and recognizing themselves in one another is what gives their relationship hope.
What is your writing process/daily writing practice?
I like to write fiction with my first cup of coffee. I leave my academic writing for the afternoons. I find that I’m more imaginative in the mornings, less burdened by to-do lists and the state of the world. Also, for me, writing novels and short stories is more cognitively taxing than writing journal articles, and I like being fresh from a night’s sleep when writing fiction. Exercise also helps. When I find myself stuck on a plot point or an issue with a character, going on a bike ride sometimes provides clarity. Physical movement seems good for the imagination.
If you could be a character in one of your favorite books, who would you be and why?
Cosimo, in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, is angry at his parents, so he climbs a tree and stays up there his entire life. I love trees and would love to live in one. I’m also envious of Cosimo’s determination to behave as stubbornly as he feels.
If you could be mentored by a famous author of the past, who would it be/what would you ask them?
Dear George Eliot — I love this line of yours: “But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?” Your writing sparkles with your passionate desire for knowledge, for truth, and passionate inquiry gives your writing tremendous authority. How would you write with authority today, when we are often skeptical of knowledge, cripplingly aware of our own partiality, and unsure to which community our readers belong?
WWPH INTERVIEWS: MEGAN DONEY, author of UNARMED: AN AMERICAN EDUCATOR’S MEMOIR
Megan Doney teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at New River Community College in Virginia. Her work has appeared in Ilanot Review, Rappahannock Review, Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals, as well as the anthologies Allegheny and If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. Doney was a Fulbright fellow in South Africa in 2007, and returned there in 2015 to study reconciliation and public narrative in the aftermath of violence. She earned an MFA from Lesley University. Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir is her first book.
What was the most challenging moment in your process of writing this memoir?
I can’t pinpoint a specific moment in the writing process itself; all of the writing was intellectually and emotionally challenging. However, I was very low after two failed connections with agents, being out on submission for more than a year, and multiple editors who basically said they thought the book was beautiful and important, but unsellable. In October 2023, I started sending the manuscript to small presses and contests and set December 31 as my final deadline; I would not submit it any further after that and I was prepared to junk it. Then, Caroline Bock from WWPH called me in January with the incredible news.
What do you hope educators like yourself will take away from this work?
I would like them to remember what brings them joy and meaning in their vocation. I believe teaching is sacred work and that learning alongside our students is a tremendous privilege. That said, I also hope that they will honor their boundaries and the limits of what they can and will do within that vocation. So much is asked of educators. It is too much to ask that they also assume mortal danger in their work.
What is your writing process/daily writing practice?
It depends on where I am in a text. I tend to think very metaphorically and associatively, and it takes me a long time to read, journal, annotate, and assemble my thoughts into something that (I think) might make sense. When actively drafting, I often use the Pomodoro method to stay focused. I’ve kept a journal my entire life, so I rely on that to work out my thoughts and have a tangible record of what I was thinking and doing at a particular moment.
What book/s are on your nightstand?
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda; The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt; Yellowface by R.F. Kuang; Once In The West by Christian Wiman; The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone.
What advice would you give to anyone writing a memoir on a difficult subject?
Do not mistake writing for therapy. See T. Kira Madden’s article on this subject. The process of creation, and turning your experience into a narrative for an audience, demands that you, the writer, become your audience and balance distance with intimacy. Madden describes it as a kind of translation. The situation, as Vivian Gornick put it, is not the story.
WWPH INTERVIEWS: CHANLEE LUU, author of THE MACHINE AUTOCORRECTS CODE TO I
CHANLEE LUU, winner of the 2024 Jean Feldman Poetry Award for THE MACHINE AUTOCORRECTS CODE TO I .
Chanlee Luu is a Vietnamese-Chinese American writer from Virginia. She received her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, and BS in chemical engineering from UVA, where she competed in poetry slams. She writes about identity, pop culture, science, politics, and everything in between. She can be found on Twitter @ChanleeLuu, and her work in Snowflake Magazine, the gamut mag, Cutbow Quarterly, Tint Journal, Honey Lit, The Offing, and diaCRITICS, among others, all at chanleeluu.weebly.com. The Machine Autocorrects Code to I is her debut collection.
“RADIANT, WITTY, SURPRISING, FIERCELY COMMITTED & IMAGINATIVE…” –Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
From where did you draw inspiration for the title of your collection, The Machine Autocorrects Code to I?
The title comes from my Taylor Swift Golden Shovel about the process of healing, which we tend to think of as an individual process, but is actually communal. The title is open to multiple interpretations, but for me, the breakdown is: “The Machine” is late-stage American capitalism or any institution that oppresses its people; “Autocorrects” means we’re forced to go against our human nature; “I” refers to individualism. A colleague read the “I” as “one” and that works too! Overall, the book is about fighting these forces.
What was the challenge in marrying your STEM background and passion for writing and music in the pursuit of this poetry collection?
I think it was a very natural process, incorporating my multiple interests and backgrounds, which is the great thing about poetry— you’re able to seamlessly create connections between seemingly unrelated things. I think the biggest challenge was the murky area between scientific accuracy and creative liberties. For example, is coffee in our veins? No, but it is a common exaggeration for a person who drinks a lot of coffee.
What is your writing process/daily writing practice?
I don’t really have a daily writing practice right now with a full-time job and going to school, but when inspiration hits, I’ll write! I’ll usually use the structure of a form (or Excel!) to help me. I think rhyme gets a bad rap in contemporary poetry, but as Ange Mlinko says, “I let the rhyme have its way with me, because a more interesting stanza will come about that way, one I could never have planned with my rational brain. I believe in pattern, if nothing else, as an antidote to garrulousness.” I don’t write in rhyme as much as I used to, but I still think the constraints of a form force me to be more creative.
What was your favorite book as a child?
I loved Nate the Great books; I wanted to be a detective and solve mysteries and eat potato pancakes. My mom tried her best to find me a long coat that looked like his so I could dress up as him for school, and I did eventually use my detective skills to solve the case of “The Missing Homework.” No, a dog did not eat it; a classmate had erased my name and put his over it!
What literary figure, dead or alive, would you want to share a meal with?
How are we defining literary figures? There are 2 obvious answers. One is Taylor Swift, who I have been a huge fan of since 2006, and I would ask her how she Masterminds all the Easter Eggs. The other would be Ocean Vuong, who inspired me to pursue poetry further than just as a hobby. If we expand it to anyone who has ever written, I would pick my paternal grandparents, my Ông Bà Nội. I met my Bà Nội once when I went to Vietnam in the 2nd grade, and she was so full of humor and joy; I never got to meet my Ông Nội. When people tell me fond stories of their grandparents, I think “that must be nice.” So yeah, I’d like to cook with them, learn their recipes, and eat/laugh with them.
